Sunday, March 19, 2017

The Glitch

Do you
remember Pixar’s Wreck-It Ralph? The innovative film that introduced us to the
characters that live inside the video games we have all loved? It’s pretty inventive, but what was
held out for me, intentionally or no, was the character of Vanellope von Schweetz
otherwise known as “The Glitch.” Vanellope is a mistake. She will wreck every game.

Her official biography reads, “Vanellope is a
pixelating programming mistake in the candy-coated cart-racing game Sugar Rush.
With a racer's spirit embedded in her coding, Vanellope is determined to earn
her place in the starting lineup amongst the other racers. The only problem:
the other racers don't want her or her glitching in the game. Years of
rejection have left Vanellope with a wicked sense of humor and a razor-sharp
tongue. However, somewhere beneath that hard shell is a sweet center just
waiting to be revealed.” While the real
story is that Vanellope is actually the game’s Princess and lead driver, her
power has been taken away by the Candy King.
The lies he has told make everyone fear that her glitch will lead to the
game being unplugged. Her mistake, her existence
then, ends their world.

Pretty dire for a glitch, right? A glitch then can be threatening to
others. It can make you see something in
yourself that you would rather not see.
But glitches are just errors not ends, and they can be overcome. My son, Sam, has a glitch. It has impeded his learning, and he is
struggling with material that he simply doesn’t understand. It is taking time away from everything. The glitch is overrunning his belief in
himself. That can be debilitating. It can be the start of a tumble of bad that
has nothing grounded in the reality that Sam is an amazing, kind, funny, hardworking,
interesting, compassionate child, and an excellent friend. I have stood as a mediator between Sam and
his school life, explaining, reassuring, and encouraging but the issues have
only become broader and the disconnect more pronounced. It was time to seek help for Sam before he
began to believe the lie about the glitch.

“Does
that make sense to you?” Eyebrow raised, I swallow my irritation at the condescension
in the question from the school psychologist.
In that moment, I knew that it didn’t matter what I said or showed. This committee of school professionals was
not going to take my prepared statement into account. In fact, they were typing up their final
report denying Sam any educational psychological testing before I even started
speaking. Working from year-old data
from a test Sam had taken while in Florida, I was told no less than 4 different times that Sam was “average.” His results were “average.” Perhaps, said the
social worker, I needed “to praise him more rather than focus on results.”

“He’s
performing fine within the low scale of what we consider to be ‘average’ for
the fourth grade.”

“There
needs to be a real need to pull him from the general education classroom. And, you know, your heart goes out to him for
his struggle, but there’s nothing really here that justifies testing for any
real disability.”

“You
should have him go outside more. At least 20 minutes a day,” said his teacher
to me.

“Maybe
get him involved in a sports team so he can locate what he’s good at,” the
special education resources teacher said.

“You
should take him to your pediatrician to be checked for anxiety so he’s happy
and well,” the school psychologist reported.

“Our
reading specialist spent two 20 minute sessions with him. He’s able to perform in these parameters
within the average to low average range” the testing scion told me.

I am
seething. I am rigid. I had come to this meeting with hopes of an
answer for Sam’s continued struggles in school.
And I felt I was being berated as a mother who wanted the school to “fix” my
son.

“Does
that make sense to you?”

No. It doesn’t make sense. Because this child is struggling daily to
achieve the marker set as average, and he is anything but average. He is fantastic. And we are exhausted.

“Does
that make sense to you?”

No. It does not make sense that a child needs to
repeatedly fail in order to garner your attention and help. It doesn’t make sense to me that everyone in
that room had decided that Sam was “good enough.” Even though his struggles with auditory and
visual memory and phonological processing were readily evident in his school
work.

“All I
want,” I said willing myself to remain civil, “is the chance to give Sam the
tools he needs to feel successful in the classroom without struggle—”

“Well, it’d
be nice if he had an easy carefree time at school,” the psychologist
interrupted….and my vision blurred. I
saw red. I had come into this dark room
to face this 8-person panel, and dressed as well as I could, and I had thanked
them all for coming to help Sam. No one responded, not the Assistant Principal who I’ve met on no
less than a dozen occasions and still has no clue of my name or those of my children,
the psychologist who had never met Sam and was working off of a year-old
report, or the school counselor who had insisted I initiate these proceedings
rather than go to an outside educational psychologist to get the testing Sam
needed done.

No one said anything, but for me there were so many invisibly loud fear inducing words vibrating in that dim and heavy room:

“You’re
wasting our time.”

“Why can’t
you be satisfied with your average son?”

“Here’s another
hysterical parent wanting perfection.”

“You haven’t
done your homework.”

“All he
needs is more attention.”

“You are
not a good mother.”

I am
willing to take just about anything as a parent. I am more than willing to be insulted, condescended
to, handled with rudeness and incivility; I am willing to maintain my dignity
in the face of all of that because I tell my children all the time, it is how
we act and the compassion we show that says who we are. How we respond means something.

When I
was driving home after gathering my papers, the report printed for me that I
had to sign, and thanking them for their time in the face of their judgmental silence, I thought of the children who
had no advocate, whose home life was so unstable that their deficits were
extraordinarily large.

I thought of that
panel, thatthey weren’t bad people, but exhausted from meetings where they
might be fighting a guardian or parent to get help for a child that the teacher
saw was desperately needed. I thought of
the mountains of paperwork that followed each of these, that they saw my request
as minimal in the broad range of suffering they experienced each day.

All this
is true, but there was no need for such disregard. According to these professionals, Sam needs:
20 minutes or more of time outside, to play on a sports team, and to be praised
to have his learning issues right themselves.

It made
me think immediately of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’sYellow Wallpaper—which if
you haven’t read it, details the effects of the ‘rest cure’ for postpartum
depression. The young woman is locked in
a room and is forced to take complete rest to get over her illness. She finds in her psychosis that the wallpaper
begins to move and speak to her. Her
husband and doctor find her at the story’s end, crawling around trying to enter
the wallpaper.

How many
times are deep seated hurts or needs or absences are felt and pushed away
because they are “inconvenient,” and do not measure highly enough in the scale
of suffering? You have them don’t
you? Haven’t they played a part in your
life?

Something you couldn’t understand
but were too embarrassed to ask about?

Being told that you wouldn’t understand anyway?

Settling for something more “suitable” to who
you appeared to be?

There are so many
fundamental challenges to our maturity and they occur at so many pivotal
moments as we age and bend and try to reach towards the sun. It’s just that for some of us, the bough
breaks instead of bending. And the
resulting wound is assuaged by self-harming strategies of addiction or
self-neglect.

In this age of social
media, the bully on the playground is unidentifiable and the resulting hurts
are even more searing. It’s not stick
and stones anymore—the words are far more hurtful and burn on your brain long
after they’ve been set there.

My friend
and I were talking one morning about a high school initiative to allow students
to take two classes online so that the children could get much needed
sleep. She thought it wonderful, as did I. The other parents though? For some reason, the desire to get children
rest is seen as a porthole to laziness.

They
should suffer. Suffering is good. It makes them stronger. Let them take every advanced class offered
even if it grinds them into pulp before the age of 18. “Well it’d be nice if he had an easy carefree
time at school….”

What is
happening here? What are we doing? And it isn’t the teachers, my goodness,
no. They are theunsung heroesin this
tale. They are the first ones shaking
their head as they receive curriculum instruction and cringe at what the State Board
of Education has decided is appropriate for a 9-year-old to grasp.

My
eldest son came to the 6th grade with a deficit in math—because now as
a 6th grader he is doing 7th grade math. Next year he will do 8th grade
math as a 12-year-old, and by his 8th grade year he will do Algebra
the resultant grade will follow him to high school. So he had to teach himself (with his language
arts mother in tow) 2 years of math in one.
He did it, and he can do it. But
did he have to?

When did
an “easy carefree time at school” become a badthing?

When did
learning effectively also mean pain and hardship?

When did
effort become synonymous with anguish?

When did being
happy become so very underrated?

I’ll
throw this out there: I think it’s more important to be happy than anything
else.

Becausehappiness will ensure success.

The aches
and pains that we had—and I know we all had them, these posts have illustrated
so many of my own over the past few years, we do not need to revisit them on
our children to guarantee that they are successful. Look at our world now. Look at the pain here, the misunderstandings,
the violence, the rage. We cannot allow
another generation to inherit the same parameters that produce it. The cycle needs to stop.

Let’s
address the hurts as they come, let’s show each other compassion and begin to
listen, let’s rethink “average.” And let’s
begin the enterprise of exceptional.

After I
talked to both my husband and another good friend who shares my dismay at what
all of this has come to, I sat and wondered.
I went outside to work and feel the sun.
I considered. Sam is working hard
at average—too hard. So we will go with
our original plan and get Sam the help he needs to fix the “glitch” that is
holding him back to love learning, yes, with ease. Because he deserves it. He deserves the chance to open a book and be
carried away by a tale so gorgeous he sees possibilities hanging like stars
above his head.

He deserves to be able
to look at an assignment and understand what is being asked of him and rejoice
in the knowledge that he can fulfill that task without worry. He deserves to be happy. And that, is anything but average.

The glitch
should not spell doom. There should be
an escape from the game for every player.
It can be overcome to find the incredible that is hiding just beneath
it. And yes, because of having to deal
with it for so long, you understand amazingly how others suffer and you swell
with compassion for it. You have an
innate capacity for loving everyone despite their own glitch. But it doesn’t have to define you.

“I’m
sorry Sam.” I turn to face him and put
down my gloves.

“Why
Mommy?”

“Well,” I
swallow and take his hand sitting on the steps to the kitchen, “I failed
today. I didn’t get you the testing.”

“Oh
Mommy, that’s okay.”

“It is?”

Sam
shakes his head, “Yeah, it’s okay.
Because they don’t know me, so they can’t see me. But it’s okay, because you do. Okay?”

He hugs
me, and you know he’s 9 so I don’t know how many more of these I’m going to
get, so I hold on just a bit more. I’m
always the last one to pull away. “I’m
happy Mommy. It’s going to be fine.”

2 comments:

My 9 year old beautiful boy also has a challenge, his is reading. We were fortunate to get the support we needed from his school, but there have been many tears on my part, especially during the two years we spent trying to get him the help we knew he needed, and we were unable to give. Knowing additional support is needed, and being turned away because 'he's still within range' was told to us for a year. Then we started to see him disengage, slowly, but enough to alarm us. And we got a teacher who saw what we saw, and gave him the attention he needed and started to bring in specialists. It's heartbreaking to know we hoped our child would fail, just so that he could finally get the support he needed. Two years in, and he is still behind his peers, but he's now able to show his strength in science and math, that he couldn't show before. Please continue to be his advocate, because when someone finally dose help, it will make things so much better.

Thanks for your kind message! We are fortunate that we can pursue the option we'd originally intended for Sam (private testing). I wanted to post about this because I think we do need a hard reset as a nation in how we perceive the standards we are expecting of our children. Their success cannot be our perceived success. Teachers need more support to be able to do the outreach as they see it, (so many simply don't have time to do so because of overwhelming demands of school board curriculum). That has to come from a change in our mindset of how education/success is calculated. I think the schools are overwhelmed. Sam will have his answers but a lot of others out there won't. So we need to be advocates for all of them. Best wishes to you and your wonderful boy.

What the story said...my reviews on goodreads

“You must understand, this is one of those moments.” “What moments?” “One of the moments you keep to yourself,” he said. “What do you mean?” I said. “why?” “We’re in a war,” he said. “The story of this war—dates, names, who started it, why—that belongs to everyone. [….] But something like this—this is yours. It belongs only to you. And me. Only to us” (56). This moment, in Téa Obreht’s lyrical first novel, The Tiger’s Wife, tells you the entirety of the story of love and loss, of memory, maps and war, of science, fables and imagined histories. The tale, set in a fictional Balkan province, is about the relationship between the narrator, Natalia and her grandfather who is a doctor. And the story involves the wars that have ravaged that area for years.

If you think back to the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia, you may remember the horror and shock of those years of unending war. The bombing of a 400 year old bridge, the massacres, the deadening of Sarajevo. While none of these events are overtly, or even covertly, covered in the novel, their echo remains. This is a novel whose strength lies in the ability to translate myth and fable, to make the moments that seem almost unknowable known. The excerpt offered in the beginning of this review is an example of that, the Grandfather takes the young Natalia past curfew to witness the surreal site of a starving elephant being led on the city streets to the closed city zoo, the place of their weekly pilgrimages. During mercurial times, there was this moment of placidity and fantasy. The war which raged and continued and was irrational as wars are, there is the fantastical presence of an elephant sloping up the quiet neighborhood street. While Natalia frets that no one will believe her, her grandfather corrects her idea by telling her that history can be something personalized and intimate. Not meant to be shared by the world, but by those who you love and trust to see your vision. It makes sense, because when histories are challenged and threatened, documents concerning your birth, the death of your families are challenged or lost, history becomes something far more ephemeral. Far more illusory unless it is placed in the permanence of your own heart.

She begins Chapter 2 by saying, “Everything necessary to understand my Grandfather lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife, and the story of the deathless man” (32). So it is between these poles of myth and story that we can locate the history of this narrator and her grandfather, both physicians, both straddling the line between science and home remedy. I could tell you at length about both, but that truly would be spoiling the journey of the story for you. But I will say that the language Obreht uses is so languid and lush, masterful and mindful that you begin to be seduced by it all. So reason, the questions of markings of slippery occurrences of war that do belong to the world that could ground the reader in the world Obreht is translating is lost because that is the moment she is NOT choosing to share. But here is the thing. I needed it. Even in a footnote or an afterward. I needed a timeline of the events that brought the destruction of these people to such impossibilities of existence. Because even though it is a public history, it is one I do not know well. It would be wrong to assume the knowledge on the part of a Western audience I think, it’s unfortunate that this is not a familiar landscape or language. I know, in the recesses of my mind I know the wars in the Balkans. The horrors, the rape camps of Bosnia, the destruction, the evacuation of Serbians…but I don’t know enough, not nearly enough to be lulled into this lush tale. A part of me refused to be completely seduced by it. Because I didn’t understand enough about it.

There is a way in which myth sustains us when horrors are too much. When person and home and identity fall away, and where you cannot locate your birthplace on a map, because it has been eliminated, what do you hold onto except your stories? As the author writes, “We had used a the map on every road trip we had ever taken, and it showed in the marker scribbling all over it: the crossed-out areas we were supposed to avoid…. I couldn’t find Zdrevkov, the place where my grandfather died, on that map. I couldn’t find Brejevina either, but I had known in advance that it was missing, so we had drawn it in” (16). Map lines, map dots, erased and redrawn because of war. How do you locate who you are, if you cannot really know where you are from? The erasing of history, of place, of belonging, of self is such a legitimate tragic legacy of war. So it is understandable that the novel moves between these two myths to bookend it, asking the reader to locate the grandfather and the narrator in its midst. I just think that the novel, which is a remarkable achievement for such a young writer, would have been that much more strong, viscerally, had it had the historical reference points it alluded to. That being said, though, it is a novel of quiet questions and loud answers and makes you wonder long after you’ve set it aside. Questions like, “What is the moment you have? The one you find that belongs to you? Who will you share it with and what familiar myth might you create?”